Recently I was thinking about what it is to live the Spirit-filled life.
I had attended a church service, which, in my view, had a lot of good things were performance was concerned – acoustics, stagecraft, etc, but in terms of the human environment it seemed to be a little lacking. The service was somewhat typical in the sense of featuring singing and then someone preaching. The actual preaching I found very good, but the atmosphere of those listening felt rather dead. The word was about life and one or two people evidently connected with it, but overall it just felt rather lacking. It was as though the audience were just used to being that – an audience, who didn’t need to engage with what was being presented, but would consume it and carry on as though no change was expected.
This experience was not new to me, I’ve come across it on several (hundred) occasions before. I wasn’t even that frustrated about the experience – which I had been a number of years ago. What I was challenged about, though was about what life is like when a good core of people turn up with genuine anticipation of an opportunity to engage with whatever it is God is doing. That’s not something to just be gearing up to when it comes to a service like this.
My friend reminded me that every day is to be lived in that manner. What is it like to live as though god is doing something around you and is also doing something that you are supposed to be in the place to actively engage with? What is He showing you today? If He is doing that in your life on a regular basis – and you have that engagement with Him wouldn’t that make your life – however humdrum and mundane on the surface – be that much more … meaningful. Could you turn up to gatherings of saints and just take on the form of a dormant and somewhat apathetic audience member?
As you can tell this thought got to gnawing at me … but it has made me have an even greater desire to live that kind of Spirit-filled life that marked out the life of Christ in an individual.
(Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash)
For His Name’s Sake
Shalom
C. L. J. Dryden
Life With CD 